PROTEA NORTH,
South Africa (WOMENSENEWS)--In
a brightly colored room next
door to the main court building
in Soweto, a sprawling township
of several million outside
Johannesburg, a lanky 11-year-old
girl lies sprawled on a large
cushion, listlessly flipping
through the pages of a picture
book.

She should be
at school or playing with
friends. Instead she's learning
how to testify against the
man she says raped her.

Rape in South
Africa has reached epidemic
proportions, with poor women
in areas such as Soweto bearing
the brunt of the violence.
Perhaps even more unsettling
is the number of child rapes.
Here in Soweto, 70 percent
of the cases dealt with by
the region's new sexual offenses
court are of children. Nationally,
the estimate is nearer 40
percent. The youngest case
of rape here was of a 3-month-old;
in other parts of the country
there have been reports of
sexual attacks on newborn
infants.

The 11-year-old
girl, whose name cannot be
used because of her age, is
typical of South Africa's
rape victims. She comes from
a poor neighborhood, a shantytown
somewhere in Soweto. One day,
a neighbor lured her into
his shack and raped her. When
he was done, he gave her a
bucket of water and told her
to wash herself. Then he gave
her two rand (about 25 cents)
and sent her on her way.

"Neighbors
saw her leaving his shack
and when they confronted him
and asked him why he would
have sex with a little girl,"
said Nthabiseng Motsau, the
chief sexual offense prosecutor
in Protea North. "He
said it was because women
were too expensive."

Myth that
Rape is Cure for AIDS May
Not Explain its Prevalence

South Africa
is widely believed to have
one of the highest incidences
of rape in the world. About
50,000 rapes were reported
in 2001 alone, although women's
groups say this is just a
small percentage of total
number. They estimate that
a woman is raped every 26
seconds and a child every
15 minutes. The South African
police service gives a slightly
lower estimate of one woman
every 36 seconds.

No one knows
why there are so many rapes
in South Africa. Poverty is
certainly part of it, but
other countries are poor yet
do not have the high rate
of sexual assault that South
Africa does. Thoko Majokweni,
director of the sexual offenses
and community affairs unit
of South Africa's National
Prosecuting Authority, says
finding out why the country's
rate of sexual assault is
so high is half the battle.

"We're
doing research into the root
causes because we can't just
be treating the symptoms all
the time," she says from
the Pretoria office where
she oversees the prosecution
of sexual offenses and family
related matters. "You
can't prevent what you don't
know."

One popular
explanation for South Africa's
high sexual assault statistics,
and particularly the high
incidence of rape of children,
is the belief that sex with
a virgin cures AIDS.

Studies on the
subject have yielded mixed
results. Some have found that
only a very small number of
South Africans actually believe
that myth, while others, conducted
in different parts of the
country by different researchers,
have found that the view is
widely held.

Motsau has no
doubts of the power of that
myth. While few defendants
in her court have used it
as a justification for their
actions--even the worst lawyer,
she says, knows such a defense
wouldn't hold up well--Motsau
says many of the perpetrators,
particularly those accused
of raping young children,
are HIV-positive.

Other activists
say that the rape problem
in South Africa is due largely
to the lack of power of women,
which is both a legacy of
apartheid and of traditional
African beliefs about the
role of women. Some observers
say that apartheid took away
power from black men, who
then began taking out their
feelings of disempowerment
on the only people less powerful
then themselves, women and
children.

"When someone
perpetrates an act of rape,
it's about reclaiming a sense
of power," said Kelly
Hatfield, director of People
Opposing Women Abuse. "Many
women in South Africa feel
disempowered financially and
socially, they have very little
self-esteem." Most South
African women and girls, like
the 11-year-old at the Protea
North court, are raped by
people they know: neighbors,
family friends, even, in the
case of children, relatives.

These cases
are often the hardest to prosecute
because the victims are often
afraid or unwilling to testify.
Women who are raped or whose
children are raped often worry
that if the rapist goes to
jail, the family will be forced
to go without food or housing.
In one recent case that received
media attention here, a mother
begged the judge not to send
her husband to jail, even
though he had raped her young
daughter. She said the family
would starve. Motsau says
many families face similar
choices and that South Africa's
public welfare system does
not have enough of a safety
net for such women.

New Courts
Expected to Address Rape Vigorously

Ultimately,
however, many observers say
that one of the main reasons
rape is so prevalent in South
Africa is because the justice
system is so ineffective in
dealing with rape. Most rapists
walk free. Of the more than
50,000 rapes reported to police
across the country in 2001,
only about 5,000 resulted
in convictions.

The government
has set up 29 new dedicated
rape courts like the one at
Protea North, which are achieving
much higher convictions. These
courts have trained prosecutors
and judges and far more time
to devote to difficult cases.

But such courts
only handle a small fraction
of the rape and sexual assault
claims in the country. In
most parts of South Africa,
the majority of rapists will
never see the inside of a
courtroom, much less the inside
of a cell.

Still, Hatfield
and others say the increased
attention to rape is a step
in the right direction. "I
have a lot of hope. One thing
about South Africa is that
it's an activist nation,"
she says. "If we can
bring down apartheid, we can
bring down violence against
women."